The Night the World Ended
by KatieByHerself
Summary: Young James Sunderland and his relationship with his father.  A companion piece to Chapter IV of "Out of the Shadows."  WARNING: Contains violence, may be triggering.


The heat was thick, oppressive; it hung in the room like a malevolent blanket, pushing down on everything in the room with palpable weight. Outside, crickets and cicadas sang in a shrill, strident chorus that pounded on the eardrums, seeming to join in unholy union with the heavy, forceful heat. The heat pushed down on the small boy, sucking the life and vitality out of him as it dragged sweat from his pores.

The boy lay curled on an old, stained Army cot, his hands pressed tightly up over his ears. He was small for his age, runty even; only his comically oversized feet hinted at the tall, powerful man he would eventually become. His hair, now darkened and stringy with sweat, was the color and consistency of corn silk when it was clean, and it hung around his head in a shaggy, uneven mop. It looked like someone had placed a bowl on top of his head and haphazardly clipped off all the hair that protruded from under the bowl's edges. This was, in fact, exactly what had happened.

He was thin; not the fit, athletic thin of an active child but the pallid, sickly thin that hints at malnutrition and disease—scurvy, rickets, possibly even tuberculosis—lurking somewhere in the near future. He was also dirty, covered with the old grime and filth that accumulates from inconsistent and unsupervised bathing.

The boy wasn't thinking about any of this, however. He ignored the hunger that was always with him, that low, aching howl from deep in his guts. He ignored the sticky, damp feeling of yet another layer of sweat and dust being added to his skin. He even ignored the pain from the fresh bruises and welts on the backs of his legs, earned that morning when he had accidently tipped over a glass of water. He ignored everything except his fruitless attempts to block out the sounds coming from down the hall.

They were fighting again. Even the shrieking crickets couldn't drown out his father's shouts and his mother's responding pleas. His father had wandered home that morning after a three day absence, three days of peace and quiet in the tiny house, and he had been drunk. 'No surprise there,' the boy thought, and gritted his teeth. He could hardly remember a time when he had seen his father completely sober; in fact, he couldn't remember one at all.

His father had shown up at breakfast, staggering on his feet and with liquor fumes wafting off him like clouds. His sudden appearance, standing in the kitchen and grinning like a skull, had startled the boy so badly that he had knocked over his water glass. The sight of the glass rolling across the table had sent his father into a rage, and he had delivered a beating first to the boy, for wasting water, and then to his mother, for raising such a worthless child. Then he'd dragged himself upstairs and passed out in a stinking heap on his bed, snoring so loud that it echoed throughout the entire house. The boy and his mother had crept around all day, desperate to not wake him up.

He had woken up about an hour ago, red-eyed, shaking and furious that there was no liquor in the house. The boy's mother had pushed the child into his room with a hiss, saying, "Stay in there, Jimmy, stay in there and don't come out!"

His father had been shouting ever since, a ragged stream of profanity and half-remembered stories that may or may not have ever happened. About ten minutes ago, the sound of muffled blows and his mother's whimpers of pain had begun floating into the room, somehow audible even over the baying insect chorus outside.

The boy clutched his thin, ancient pillow closer over his ears, trying to ignore what could never, ever be ignored, even with nine years of practice. Hot tears of rage squeezed out from under his eyelids, and he prayed to whatever god was listening to make him older, bigger, strong enough to… to what? To run away, to get his revenge, to kill the drunken monster in the other room? He wasn't sure, he never had been, but he knew that if he was bigger, he could do… _something_. Anything but lie here like a weak coward.

The old man was really wound up tonight; he usually wore himself out after this long, either crashing back into bed to sleep off the shaking hands and bleary eyes or wandering back out to whatever bar still gave him credit. The thin wall of the boy's room shuddered as a body crashed against it from the other side, and the boy cringed, trying to curl himself into an even tighter ball, subconsciously protecting his stomach and chest from long years of practice. He gasped as the welts on his thighs pressed into his calves, and he moaned deep in his throat, biting his wrist so that his father wouldn't hear him. The sight of his son's tears always drove the old man into a frenzy.

It got quiet out in the hallway. The boy raised his head, knowing that the quiet was deceptive and usually occurred right before one final burst of violence. For a moment, he dared to hope that it might be almost over and he could try and catch some fitful sleep tonight. He could hear his father's slurred voice through the wall and his mother's tearful responses, and then…

Then the night split apart with his mother's scream and a crash that sounded like the end of the world. All carefully honed preservation instincts forgotten, the boy jolted out of bed and ran out into the hallway; his mother cried, she whimpered, she pleaded, but she never screamed. She knew better than to scream.

The hallway was dimly lit; the old man hadn't paid the electric bill again, and the only light came from gas-burning Coleman lanterns. In the reddish, flickering glow, the boy saw his father standing at the top of the stairs, hunched over and looking down, one hand bracing himself against the wall. There was no sign of his mother.

Remembering the horrible crash, which was playing over and over in his head on an infernal loop, the boy ran to the top of the stairs, pushing his father aside to look down them.

His mother lay at the base of the stairs, crumpled and broken. The boy was crazily reminded of a marionette he'd had once, a dancing little puppet that had brought him endless amusement until his father had cut all its strings for some imagined offense. His mother looked like the marionette without its strings… jumbled, disjointed and pathetic. The marionette, however, had not had a puddle of blood under its wooden body, nor had that nonexistent puddle of blood been steadily growing.

The boy stared in horror, his eyes straining in their sockets. He started down the stairs, telling himself there was something he could do to help even though he knew better, and he got one bare foot on the top step before his father grabbed him.

The old man grasped the boy around the neck with one hand and slammed him up against the wall. The sudden movement from the drunken, lurching monster surprised the boy so much that he didn't even feel the pain from a blow strong enough to make his teeth rattle. His father pressed his thick forearm against the boy's collarbone, leaned in close, and hissed, "Just where do you think you're going, Jimmy?"

The boy's eyes watered from his father's breath, which smelled as dank as if some small animal had crawled into his throat and died long ago. "Mom…" he gasped out, the wind knocked out of him from the blow. "Mom's hurt…"

"Bitch is worse than hurt," his father growled. "Bitch is dead."

The boy gaped at his father, not wanting to believe what he already knew was true. No one had a puddle of blood that big underneath them and was only hurt. He stuck a quick glance back down the stairs, a glance interrupted by another shake from the old man, and the boy felt something inside him, a small, trembling light that he had nearly forgotten about, extinguish and die forever.

"You bastard!" he spat, flailing out and hitting his father with weak, ineffectual fists. "You killed her, you bastard, you killed her! Murderer! Murderer!"

His blows glanced off his father's head and shoulders; the old man was so drunk that they barely registered in his conscience. His son's words, however, did.

"You shouldn't say things like that, Jimmy," he muttered, his voice thick and clotted in his throat. "You shouldn't say things like that at all…" and he slowly started to squeeze his son's neck.

The boy's words cut off as quickly as they had started, and he began to choke for air as his father's hand tightened around his windpipe. The old man leaned into the boy with his other arm, creating a deep, bone-crushing pressure on the boy's chest to match the squeezing on his throat. The boy struggled, the mindless thrashing of desperate survival, and he barely felt it when his collarbone snapped under his father's arm. His struggles grew weaker and weaker as his brain fought against unconsciousness, and as blackness started to leak into the corners of his vision, he heard his father say, as if from very far away, "… you shouldn't ever say that again, Jimmy. Remember… never again," and with the last of his consciousness, the boy nodded.

The pressure on his throat and chest let up at the same time, and the boy crashed to the floor in a heap. He sucked in great, sobbing survival breaths, his throat burning so badly that he almost didn't notice the searing pain from his fractured collarbone. His father loomed over him, his hands limp and empty at the ends of his wrists, and he said, in a voice that sounded like the rolling thunder of a dark god's, "Remember what you promised, boy. Remember that you'll never talk about what happened tonight again."

Keeping his head down now, the boy curled up on the floor in a protective posture. The old man grunted and kicked him in the shoulder. "You listening, boy?"

The boy moaned, now feeling the pain in his collarbone to match the pain in his throat, but he nodded, his forehead scraping on the floor. He left bloody smears behind from a bloody nose.

The old man kicked him again and snarled, "Clean up that blood, boy! And remember," and he knelt down and leaned in close to his quivering, crying son, "all you have now is me. No one else wants you, and no one else ever will. All you have is _me_."

The boy's father staggered off to his bedroom, leaving his son in a crumpled, ruined heap, weeping soundlessly.


End file.
